Sunday, December 9, 2012

So many weird custom layouts - jeeze, it's like MySpace all over again.Bad drawing is bad - but better than nothing. The Deer animation has been coming along pretty slowly - I was trying to make a really cool forest background for it, but it just wasn't working out, and I became so discouraged that I started putting it off. Eventually I showed it to a family member who said it didn't look right, and after more messing around I finally realized - wait a minute, I'm terrible at painting backgrounds, especially in Flash! So I gave up and went back to simple colors. So more progress coming on that thing.I think I'll try to make more silly drawings like this one to bust through my art block.Cheers!

Wednesday, November 28, 2012

Some previews of my next little mini project - I've been looking through some old college projects and decided to try finishing or remaking the ones that were unfinished or barely passable.First up is an animation of a deer jumping through a forest - the original was done in Maya and was too bleh to bother posting here. I'll be remaking it in Flash to train myself in the program and some animation techniques.Here's some reference drawings and a test animation incorporating frame and tween based animation:

Wednesday, November 21, 2012

Some quick and dirty dragon head sketches for Photoshop practice - I tend to draw these when I can't think of anything else. Though I did attempt some skeletal structure and details.I've loved dragons since I was in preschool - I've been drawing them since then. In one of my college projects I recreated the way I drew dragons when I was younger - I don't have it anymore (darn) but here's a (very rough) recreation of a recreation:

The one on the left is a recreation of a drawing I did in a little booklet in Preschool where we had to write and draw underneath phrases like "My favorite animal is..." I of course, put dragons.The one on the right is roughly similar to how I drew dragons and other reptiles through elementary school and beyond. Lots of triangle eyes. =PDigimon was a big influence on me then, I had a stapled stack of drawings of my own original digimon back then, wish I still had it... Maybe I can try to recreate those next?Anyways, I actually have some game reviews and accompanying screenshots sitting around, I'll finish those up and post 'em here soon.Cheers!

Tuesday, November 20, 2012

A quick animation I made yesterday evening of a ball bouncing off a wall. I know it looks a little weird bouncing off the wall, this rig is a bit tricky to pull off squash and stretch at weird positions like that one. Took about 4 hours using Maya 2010, extra time was spent setting up some good render settings and trying out Adobe Media Encoder, which came with my pack of CS4 programs (to my surprise). Between that and my Sony Vegas Platinum 10, I'm all set for pumping out good quality playblasts and renders.Uploaded to YouTube because no matter what I did the file size was "too small" for Vimeo. Weird!

I'm working out of a bit of a slump/depression creativity-wise, so I'll be producing either a short animation or sketches at least every other day.Cheers!

Thursday, October 25, 2012

I would have uploaded these earlier if my internet hadn't mysteriously crapped out on me last night and stayed off all night and day. Eventually I had to turn off the computer and unplug everything from the modem, then plug them back in and turn everything on. Thanks goodness it's back and we don't have to get a new modem!Anyway, where was I...? Oh yeah, old Megaman sketches. Here ya go.First up is Fireman - As I remember, I made these in Autodesk Sketchbook Express 2010 to test it out. It's a nice, intuitive drawing/painting program for artists, but I don't have the full version so anything I save will merge all my layers. Oh well. =/

Wednesday, October 24, 2012

After moving in with my aunt and being without internet for a few months, I'm finally back!It's been hard times for my family and I so far, but we're working to get to a better place in our lives now - in simpler terms, we're saving up to move to Oregon in a couple months.In terms of my art, I've been lacking in inspiration/motivation, so I've decided to get back into practicing every day (ideally).I've found a great website to do so - Posemaniacs.comIt's a massive free database of CG human models in various poses and camera angles for artists to practice figure drawing.

Friday, February 10, 2012

Life update - We've moved out of San Diego and are staying with my dad's mother in Fort Mohave, Arizona until I can secure my first job.

It's a quiet little neighborhood near a quiet little town in the desert, so it's great for old folks like grandma. For me it's almost TOO quiet after living near the freeway for a year, and the lack of greenery is a tad depressing. But the house is big and beautiful and it's always good living with family.

Grandma's famous for her cooking and hospitality (she had to raise 5 kids, after all), but I wanted to show her a recipe of my own. I'm sharing it here for anyone interested:

Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Unlike many more fortunate gamers in the mid to late 90’s, I did not own a Super Nintendo console in my younger days. But I did have its main competition, the Sega Genesis. Too bad I didn’t play it very much – but I had good reason.

Our poor little Genesis was a hand-me-down, previously owned by my half-brother. He’s about 10 years older than me, so by the time I got it the console was pretty worn out – it sometimes had trouble loading games, and its only working controller sometimes wouldn’t register my button presses. My half-brother had also sold all the good Genesis games we had, so I was left with a handful of mediocre games: